Storing data and be awesome

Monthly Archives: April 2014

Kelly Herrell, Brocade

Kelly takes us back to 2013 and the software defined anything. Was it really there? Was anything real that year? In 2013 the real work on the Software Defined Network concept started!

In 2013 SDN started

Last year it was about how the world’s largest customers, the largest buyers, demanding the vendors to come up with a software defined product that works for them. The message was clearly that the industry wasn’t yet giving customers what they actually needed. Remember that the customers define what vendors should target for, not the other way around!

Share this:

Thomas Cornely, Nexenta

IDC reveled a new report they did with EMC: In the digital universe today only 5% of the currently available data (4.4 Trillion GB) is analyzed. Imagine that in 2020 we have 10 times as much data! That’s 44 Trillion GB of data, people! How much is 1 Trillion GB? That’s a 1 followed by 12 zeroes…. Gigabytes, that is: 12 Trillion GB! Where does all this data come from? It’s the internet of things, like sensor data, meta data, but also the vast amount of data that people create these days. Think about what people do all day on their mobile devices using social media, higher resolution personal data like photos, but also more of this high-resolution data. You can imagine that the digital universe is exploding! And again: only 5% of that data is being analyzed today. Imagine what that means in the year 2020! This is what’s called big data: analyzing the vast amount of data so it becomes useful.

Generate, store, analyze, get value out of it

Share this:

Windows XP patches on the black market?

Despite what several reports say, Windows XP is still an operating system that is widely used, all over the world. And now that Microsoft has stopped its official (and free) support of this succesful OS, a lot of people find themselves in need of a scarce good: XP patches. So what happens when you need a scarce good: a black market!

An official date for the first black market is already known: May 13, 2014, since that would be the first day the formerly regular patch distribution will be no longer be initiated for Windows XP.

Share this:

SDDC 2014 – Software Defined Data Center

Stephen Foskett opens the symposium by welcoming this he guests and crew. It’s the 3rd Software Defined Data Center symposium and the number of people attending is quite good. The goal of this symposium is to find out what SDDC is in reality. The day schedule looks good with various companies sharing their thoughts.

Share this:

BRU – Brussel Airport

My first report in the series “WiFi all over the world” is about BRU. The airport offers free WiFi through the TELENETHOTSPOT. It’s available just about everywhere you go on the airport, but on an Apple device this can be a bit of a hassle if you try to connect for the first time.

After selecting the hot spot, you are supposed to be connected to a logon page, but I faced that this page didn’t appear until I retried 3 or 4 times. Opening a browser and surfing to a random site might help.

You are presented with a page on which a commercial is shown. Again, on an Apple device this didn’t work, but I found out that simply waiting half a minute, maybe a minute, helps.

You now see a page on which you need to fill out a form with PIn codes, passwords and your wife’s birthday (just kidding, but that form is unnecessary long).

You will then get logon credentials and you’re good to go. Enjoy your WiFi!

Share this:

(Free) WiFi all over the world

This year I’m doing my fair share of traveling again and I’ve decided to write a blog on each of my Free WiFi experiences during the year (or longer?) It could very well be an ongoing comparison of the various places, public or private and even airplanes!

WiFi at work is fantastic and at home it works like a charm as well, but tomorrow I’m flying to San Jose (California) and I need my internet access! I brought a book just in case I’ll be disconnected for a long period of time.

The “WiFi all over the world” series will start tomorrow when I’ll be flying from BRU to DUB to start with and from there to SFO. I will be picked up at the airport and I’m told the ride has on-board WiFi as well. I’ve never tried using WiFi in a car so far, but hey! I’m not driving myself this time, so I should be able to get some airtime when driving to the hotel 🙂 During my stay in San Jose and around there, in Silicon Valley, I will be using a variety of hot spots and I’m told I should have 99% coverage. I’ll be flying back home from SFO to DUB on Saturday and from DUB to BRU on Sunday.

I will dedicate a separate blog on each of the experiences and link to each of them from this starting point (this first blog). So expect to see some editing in this piece of text in the future.

Think about Free WiFi (or paid if I really really have to) in places like hotels, airports, a symposium, work, at customer’s sites, in cities, airplanes, taxis, regular cars (I’m getting one with WiFi in it myself in a few weeks)

Enjoy my first, but ongoing series!

April 21, 2014: Brussels Airport (BRU): Free WiFi. Read all about it here.

April 21, 2014: Dublin Airport (DUB): Free WiFi. Read all about it here.

April 26, 2014: San Francisco International Airport: Free WiFi. Read all about it here.

Share this:

Storage Field Day 5

Suddenly, I received this tweet. Something about Tech Field Day, Storage Field Day. What? Ok, I actually met Stephen Foskett last year in Las Vegas and I know Gabrie Van Zanten, a colleague of mine, visited the TFD event. Also Roy Mikes, another friend of mine attended the event in the past. I had a decent share of information about the event, but it was still no surprise that I was honored by the invitation I received.

Software Defined Data Center Symposium

The first full day the delegates will attend the SDDC Symposium in Santa Clara. On April 22 the whole day is for discussions of OpenFlow, software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage, converged infrastructure, and the greater software-defined future! I’m quite curious who will be there, what we can discuss about and the depth in which discussions will go, but I guess I’ll have to see and find out. It’s exciting for sure!

Share this:

Heartbleed OpenSSL bug

OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f as well as 1.0.2-beta1 are indicated to be vulnerable to Heartbeat Vulnerability.

Due to a missing bounds check in OpenSSL during the TLS heartbeat extension, a maximum of 64 KiB of memory can be revealed to a connected client or server. This may potentially allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain access to sensitive information such as private keys, login passwords, and encryption keys (the so-called Secret Keys). As a result of this disclosure of potentially sensitive information, these Secret Keys could be leveraged to decrypt other sensitive information or conduct so-called man-in-the-middle attacks.

I won’t copy/paste the complete list in this post as the list will be updated over time, but in general I can disclose that (according to EMC) Brocade FOS, Centera, Clariion, Connectrix Manager, Control Center, Data Domain OS, ESRS, Isilon OneFS, , Networker, RecoverPoint, Replication Manager, ViPR, VNVe, VNX1, VNX2, VPLEX, XtremIO are not vulnerable.

You should read the article on bit.ly/1hwgFpW for specific other products as there are a few that might need attention.

Make sure you patch your products if you need to and please change your passwords every now and then (and in this case as soon as possible).

Share this:

It sure took me a while to read through the tons of performance related materials, but I admit that having done the Clariion IE Expert, Clariion TA and of course the latest VNX IE Expert and VNX TA Expert exams also helped. I got my invitation to join the USPEED gang a little over a year ago, in early 2013 and just like my fellow colleagues I was swamped in work and unable to even start reading through all the material.

During a beta I did for EMC in February ’14 I became interested again in actually getting that certification and all the goodies that come with it and I started reading and testing myself. For a test I just did the free VNX IE Specialist and Expert test exams as well as the TA specialist and expert exams: these are wonderful exams that can prepare you to actually enter the major league of storage gods (ahem).

Follow me on social media

Disclaimer

My tweets are my own, my blog is my own. The posts found here reflect my personal opinions.
The published content is not approved or even read in advance by any vendor and does not necessarily reflect opinions of this vendor. This is my blog, not a vendor blog.